When Nvidia was in the Kotaku offices the other day showing off, well, something we can't quite talk about yet, they noticed we didn't have a dedicated gaming PC. (All of Kotaku's gaming rigs are in the homes of our writers, including mine.) So they had Falcon Northwest cook up a nice little rig—Intel i7 2600K (with a splash of overclocking), 4GB o'RAM, and a couple of GTX580 cards with a grand-and-a-half of onboard RAM in SLI—and let us use it for a while.

Oh, and they threw in three 1080p 3D monitors from Asus.

Ostensibly we're supposed to be testing 3D Vision performance in Battlefield 3, but since the beta doesn't support 3D vision yet, we've been using the rig for other games. Like RAGE (which doesn't support 3D Vision either! Argh!).

While the Battlefield 3 beta is a little too hardware-intense for native 1:1 pixel performance on all three monitors, RAGE is doing juuuusst fine on this beastly rig, even at 2x anti-aliasing. And I haven't even installed the latest Nvidia drivers, so I'm hoping to squeeze out a little more juice before I'm done tinkering.

Some day soon, Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is going to walk on stage at some obscure…
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Whatever you think, though, I'm not ashamed at all to say that when PC gaming works right—and "right" is pretty relative, as even though this machine came from Falcon with Windows 7 installed and configured I still had to do some tweaking to get everything running right—it really does make a person feel like they're sitting right on the cusp of what gaming experiences are possible.